I started Arlie Russell Hochshild’s Strangers In Their Own Land right at the start of the new year. I read the first 50 pages or so, pondering–the whole time–why I should care at all about what I was reading. (The book is about folks in rural Louisiana, and how one sociologist from UC Berkeley came to understand them by leaving her west coast bubble and truly engaging with them, in their land.) Snapshot from the cab of a pickup – stories told from a bayou living room. Oral cajun histories, mediated into a narrative of social exploration between two poles of the American political divide. I imagine the book eventually gets to some deeper points about how much we all have in common, despite our political differences, and in some undefined way, I am certain that was why I was reading it: I wanted to be reminded that we’re all in this together, we’re all good people, E pluribus unum and such.

The breaching of the US Capitol last week placed that idea in a very different space for me though. One much more distant, frankly. I find myself less empathetic, if not wholly disinterested, in GOP culture these days or in the work needed to understand “where they’re coming from” with the nonsense of the day. There seems to me to be some honest and responsible cadre of the GOP–maybe 5%–who understand the rot and the insanity and are willing to address it in good faith, and the remainder, if not fully bought in to various conspiracy theories or cult of personality are acquiescing at best, but more likely using and amplifying these trends for their own self-interested gain. My understanding is that in a sense, Strangers In Their Own Land was the first of many narratives to follow getting at ‘the trump voter we met at the diner‘ and it’s reportage ilk from the 2016 and 2020 campaigns. I wasn’t sure I needed any more word count on the subject though; after last Wednesday, I know I do not. I’ve seen enough. Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is seeming much more suitable to this moment.

---

Ahead of the Inauguration of Joe Biden this Wednesday, much reporting and commentary reminds us of pending protests at all 50 State capitals. For the record, I am 100% fine with protests from people distrustful of single-party rule over the next two years — or really, anything rooted in reality. I wonder though how much of the ‘Stop the Steal’ brain cancer is fueling this though and how much of it will be on display. I also wonder how much violence will be able to be done by folks using the protests for their own ends.

I also do not think the President is done trying to thwart the legitimate transfer of power. Even at this late hour.

---

currently reading: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter
currently listening: Evermore by Taylor Swift

The polls closed tonight on the US Senate run-off elections in Georgia and I am fascinated by the distance I have maintained from the contest. The outcome will undoubtedly have consequences legislatively and beyond, however I am completely at peace at this moment.

---

There is a California Buckeye Tree that grows in Strawberry Canyon (Berkeley, CA) that is quite singular – even if my hunch that it formed from two saplings is correct.

---

I have spent the last week away from work and began 2021 with a focus on the house and back yard, working to improve and simplify things in form and function. It has been productive. Things feel quiet. Enough small details have been remedied that it feels like there has been a noticeable change. I am looking forward to occupying this stillness as much as possible and to keep slowly improving each room, and each thing.

-30-

currently reading: The Beauty of Everyday Things, Soetsu Yanagi
last full listen: High in the Sky by the Hampton Hawes Trio

Below, books read this year.

Originally, my intention was to devote the year to current titles only. This lasted until September when I found newly released titles lacking and cracked open Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk which had been laying around unread for a couple of years. Looking back, I feel the experiment was worthwhile and I would recommend it, even though I do not intend to repeat it in 2021.

Not quite in order, and with hyperlinks for those I am most enamored of.

• The Education of an Idealist (Samantha Power)
• Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker, Ph.D)
• Why We’re Polarized (Ezra Klein)
• The Heap (Sean Adams)
• Agency (William Gibson)
• A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America (Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonnig)
• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Tony Ord)
• Surviving Autocracy (Masha Gessen)
• Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson)
• The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency (John Dickerson)
• Capital and Ideology (Thomas Piketty, translation by Arthur Goldhammer)
• Freedom: An Unruly History (Annelien De Dijn)
• The Fifth Risk (Michael Lewis)
• The Sourdough School: The Ground-Breaking Guide to… (Richard Hart, Vanessa Kimbell
• You’re Not Listening (Kate Murphy)
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• Give People Money (Annie Lowry)
• One Billion Americans: The Case For Thinking Bigger (Matthew Yglesias)
• Washington: A Life (Ron Chernow)
• Urban Jungle: Living and Styling With Plants (Igor Josifovic and Judith De Graaff)
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)

-30-

---

TL;DR:

The windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) is one of the hardiest palms available to grow indoors or outside in the garden. This cold-hardy palm is also great for northern gardening climates as it can withstand freezing temperatures as low as 10 degrees. 

It is  a slow-growing plant that will take years to reach its full height of 6 feet indoors. Moreover, this plant is a great choice outside in the garden for water conservation, as it is drought-tolerant and resists pests.

Basically this plant is easy to grow and care for, as it grows well in full to partial sun and adapts well to most climates and soil types. The highly ornamental palm has stiff, fan-shaped leaves that are beautifully compacted and resplendently green, radiating from its stem on a sturdy trunk.

Here is what mine looks like:

For helpful plant tips and other gardening advice, hit me up.

-30-

Follow up to previous post: initial numbers from election night looked like Trump over-performed polling averages between 3 – 5%. My calls for OH, NC and FL went the other way and lo as such, election day became election week. Final tallies TBD due to the closeness of GA and AZ. (and maybe WI — haven’t looked lately)

I’ve been returning periodically to the passage below from Heather Cox Richardson and mean to sit with it a while in the days to come:

This election was not particularly close, but pundits warn that the fact that 70 million Americans voted for Trump and 74 million and counting voted for Biden shows that we live in two very different Americas, and that, for all his talk of unity, Biden will have a hard time finding common ground with Trump supporters.

Pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles, but it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” According to political historian Rick Perlstein, a scholar of the right, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling listeners that Democrats have stolen the election, and urging his listeners to abandon the Republican establishment, which did not sufficiently back Trump.

Entertainment personality Alex Jones is more extreme. He showed up to the Maricopa County, Arizona, counting center, where he told the crowd that “The Bidens are Communist Chinese agents” and urged listeners to fight “those scumbag Nazi bastards.” Jones owns a far-right conspiracy theory website aptly named InfoWars. According to an article by Veit Medick in Der Spiegel, about two-thirds of his income comes from the merchandise he sells to combat the conspiracies he talks about.

The Republicans’ alternative reality is quite literally deadly. Although 82% of Trump voters believe the pandemic is at least somewhat under control, today America had more than 122,000 new infections, and more than 1100 people died. An analysis by the Associated Press shows that 93% of the 376 counties with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases per capita voted for Trump.

source: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-6-2020

The emphasis is mine, but in a victory lap where Democrats keep mentioning “Science” in their speeches, and Republican activists are in front of polling sites yelling “fake news” it seems epistemology is an elephant in this room we share.

My prediction for the final Electoral Results in the 2020 race is an immediate Biden win, called on election night; with an eventual blowout margin at 368 e.c. votes to only 170 e.c. votes for Trump.

Biden’s lead nationally–somewhere around 10% over Trump–when coupled with what appears likely to be a record-setting electoral turnout, will translate into Biden taking most of the battleground states, including FL, NC and GA where he is currently ahead in most models — and Ohio depending on who you ask.

If I am correct, it’s basically all settled Tuesday night. Either NC, FL, or GA should be called on election night, possibly all three decided by midnight, ET. This is how the evening starts and will have a lot to say about the prospect of a quick result.

En route to final calls for these three States, what I’m looking for early on in the Southeast are indicators that Trump is under-performing his final 2016 percentages, by county, in any Southeastern state that should have the quickest results (looking at Delaware, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida for this) **once 100% precincts have reported** in any given county. (note: I expect an under-performance)

Of particular interest to me, my home state of Florida, and the largest counties outside of Miami-Dade (which is always the last to report):

County	Trump totals 2016:
Broward County, Florida	31.4%
Palm Beach County, Florida	41.2%
Hillsborough County, Florida	44.7%
Orange County, Florida	35.7%
Pinellas County, Florida	48.6%
Duval County, Florida	49.0%
Lee County, Florida	58.7%
Brevard County, Florida	57.8%
Polk County, Florida	55.4%
Volusia County, Florida	54.8%
Pasco County, Florida	58.9%
Sarasota County, Florida	54.3%

New Hanover County, North Carolina was tagged by Dave Wasserman as his bellwether county for the state and if it’s good enough for Wasserman… well. In 2016, 49.5% of the vote went for Trump in that county, and NC ended up at 49.8% for the Orange one. North Carolina is expected to start off with a blue mirage on election night, with a dramatic red-shift. NC could be called that night. (If it is not, the subsequent votes that arrive through Nov. 12 will likely favor Biden). Biden is up +2 in the FiveThirtyEight model and that should be enough to get it done on election night.

After the Southeastern states are called or around that time, results from Minnesota and Wisconsin should likely be coming in. Biden will win both by morning, but once GA, NC and FL are in the bag, the question is simply how quickly we can get to 270 and have FOX News call the race for Joe Biden. Assuming one is called (MN, lets say) and the other (WI) is still counting, ten electoral votes are in-hand and Mountain states are up.

In this case, either Arizona, Colorado or New Mexico will race to be the Zombie Bite that ends Trump’s presidency. The first to go blue seals his fate, full stop, and guarantees* Biden reaches 270 no matter what was going on, or will go on, *anywhere* in Maine, *anywhere” in Nebraska, or in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Hawaii (good luck!), Arizona (if Colorado is first) or Ohio. (all of these states I have for Biden, minus Iowa and Texas for what that’s worth)

Straight-up, DJT could ‘keep the change’ at that point and it’d still be over. CA, OR and WA are 74 untouchable shades of blue and my guess is that the map that will call the Presidency will look something like this (though I’m betting Colorado is the Zombie bite) by midnight, Oakland time.

Obviously, so long as Biden wins, I’m good; this is more something I wanted to put down ahead of time as I worked through exactly how I expect election night to go and something to explain my thinking to anyone who asks between now and Tuesday evening.

My final map, to compare against eventual results is as follows:

-30-

“We’ve all learned a terrible lesson. As much as we want to believe we can operate independently of politics and it’s all about the science, it took just a few months to  hobble our ability to steer the course of this pandemic. So we can pretend that the politics don’t matter, but we have been kneecapped.”

-CDC Official, speaking anonymously for fear of being fired.

---

“Just 60 customers with interests at stake before the Trump administration brought his family business nearly $12 million during the first two years of his presidency, The Times found. Almost all saw their interests advanced in some fashion, by Mr. Trump or his government.”

from 7 Key Findings About Trump’s Reinvented Swamp, NYTimes – Oct 10th, 2020

---

Merging the two quotes above, one arrives at a view of the current administration subverting the work of the federal government for their own political benefit, the purpose of which is continued and increased financial gain for the President and his family.

-30-

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are two go-to political scientists anyone should listen to if they find themselves suddenly considering the disconnect between the legislation routinely fought for by the GOP–legislation that ultimately provides most of its benefits toward the über-rich–and the economic station that so much of the GOP base find themselves in. Their latest book together, Let Them Eat Tweets, focuses on this disconnect and the struggle the GOP faces in its commitment to ideals that benefit a plutocratic elite within a democratic framework. They do a fair job of it in my estimation and succeed in making their case that the current GOP serves two constituencies of drastically differing sizes: The über-wealthy on one hand, and a subset of the working and middle classes on the other. Republican elites serve the rich by passing legislation reducing tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals and by repealing regulations protecting common goods (air, water, etc.); they serve the middle and working classes quite differently though – most often through symbolic and vocal gestures like “defending Christmas” and whatever else seems to have traction in the moment. The authors stay true to their academic pedigrees, making their case with data and analysis rather than ideologically-driven bombastic assertion like so much of the nonsense that shows up on the “Social Science and Current Events” sections of most bookstores of late.

If they fail–and I think they do on the following point–it is because they have written a book that will only be read by those who have the least to gain from their insights. Their thesis, that the GOP relies on a culture-war obsessed base to fuel the machine’s ability to defund and destroy programs benefiting the majority of Americans in efforts to reduce taxes on the very wealthy, is well-tilled soil. From G.William Domhoff’s Who Rules America? to Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, to any of the latest rounds of titles dealing with the impact of Identity and Partisanship on electoral politics (see: Sides, Tessler and Vavreck’s Identity Crisis or Klein’s Why We’re Polarized), I feel like I’ve been reading this book, or some version of it, for the last twenty years. What it offers that the others do not however, is essentially a closer (although not limited) view on the recent events of the last four years or so. But this is not a new phenomenon. The names have changed, but the trends are long-standing.

The failure in writing to their audience goes beyond the authoring of a book that simply dunks on the folks not reading it (although to be clear, these are solid dunks, impeccably argued and sourced and true). Implicit in their larger argument–explicit in exceedingly limited measure to be fair–is that Democrats should be doing more to focus on the economic and social concerns these currently republican constituencies are focused on. By not calling the party or its members out they do a disservice in my opinion; criticizing the GOP is not enough – more must be sought from the Democratic party and at least a few more pages can reasonably have been expected by the authors on the point.

When one views parties as simply massive coalitions among differing stakeholders and classes, it is hard to imagine how the Democratic party folds in rural Georgian voters who currently fly TRUMP 2020 flags in their front yard with BLM protestors in Portland demanding police accountability and seeking equal protection under the law. But then, that is the role of a party. To be a big enough tent to get the things done that need doing — not just to narrowly win the occasional election. What Hacker and Pierson have done here is successfully explain how similarly disparate parts of the electorate–a minority with enough money to fund the party, and a majority with the numbers to make winning elections possible–are effectively catered to by the current GOP, with enough success to still be relevant. What I hope to see in the future is a Democratic party that has found better ways to attract a much larger coalition to govern effectively going forward.

Equally valid, a hope exists that the GOP and its allies either abandons their commitments to the plutocratic elite or shifts their focus to focus on substantive legislative efforts that truly benefit the working and middle classes in this country, ceasing the culture-war lip-service that debases so many of their voters and diminishes the political discourse in the country while doing little to nothing to address the growing inequality in America, or address the challenges that must be confronted for the country to remain a truly indispensable nation in the world. So long as the current model works however, there is little motivation for the GOP to change.

-30-

last full listen: West Coast Grooves, Guthrie Govan

currently reading: Freedom: An Unruly History, Annelien de Dijn